One year ago, the imminent arrival of helicopter money among endless discussions of pervasive lowflation was all the rage within high-finance policy circles. Then, everything changed as if on a dime, and in recent months the dominant topic has been global coordinated tightening – and in some cases even revisions to central bank mandates and the lowering of inflation targets – perhaps as a result of central banks’ realization that monetizing debt by central banks leads to bad outcomes, not to mention global asset bubbles.

But not everywhere.

On Sunday, Algeria’s prime minister unveiled a plan to plug the country’s budget deficit as the the OPEC member state looks to offset lower oil revenue by directly borrowing from the central bank, while avoiding international debt markets. In other words, direct monetization of debt, which bypasses commercial banks as a monetary intermediate, and is better known as “helicopter money.”

According to Bloomberg, the five-year plan presented by Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia aims to balance the budget by 2022, and reverse a deficit that ballooned with the plunge in global crude prices, which also cut foreign reserves by nearly half.

“If we turn to external debt, as the IMF suggests, we will need to borrow $20 billion a year to repay the deficit and within four years we will be unable to repay the debt,” Ouyahia said. “This is what made the government look at non-traditional financing.”

And that’s where the country’s central bank comes in.

With domestic debt currently around 20 percent of gross domestic product, Algeria has room to take on additional borrowing, the IMF has said. Earlier this month, the cabinet authorized the central bank to lend money to the Treasury to narrow the deficit. Businesses and importers would stand to benefit from a cash injection from the regulator, but analysts say the plan has risks.

The general view in inflation is dead, essentially forever. Maybe. Maybe not.

We all know real-world inflation for big-ticket expenses is far above the official rate of around 2% annually.

Yet conventional economists are virtually unanimous that deflation is the danger and inflation is a “good thing” we need to spur so servicing existing debt becomes easier for debtors.

Due to the deflationary pressures of technology and stagnant wages for the bottom 90%, the consensus sees low inflation as far as the eye can see.

When the consensus is near-100% on one side of the boat, we can safely bet Reality will not conform to expectations. This leads to a question: what could cause official near-zero inflation to surprise the consensus and leap higher?

One possible answer is “helicopter money”: money created by central banks that is distributed directly to households via tax rebates, debt forgiveness, or Universal Basic Income (UBI).

For the past 17 years, central banks have funneled credit and liquidity into the banks at the top of the wealth-power pyramid. Very little of this new “wealth” has trickled down to the bottom 90% of households in the real economy who have seen their earnings stagnate and their costs rise.

Now that debt and essentials are absorbing much of the bottom 90%’s earnings, there’s little fuel left for additional debt-based consumption. This is why we see auto sales plummeting.

The only way the central banks/states can fuel more debt and spending is to drop “helicopter money” directly into the consumers’ checking accounts.

Once they do this, the “new money” goes directly into the real economy. This is quite different than the past 17 years of monetary stimulus that went mostly into assets owned by the wealthy.

There’s another driver of inflation: shortages of essential commodities. I define inflation very simply: a loss of purchasing power, which means we are paying more money for the exact same good or service.

The US Federal Reserve (Fed) is considering raising rates. Is the “normalization” of interest rates about to happen which savers and investors have been yearning for? Most likely not. Policymakers are merely realizing that the policy of zero rates — or even negative rates as in the euro area or Switzerland — doesn’t work as intended.

The wider public is very much against it. Banks, for instance, run into trouble because their profits come under severe pressure in an environment of zero, let alone negative, interest rates. Bank clients start protesting as their bank deposits no longer earn a positive return. They even start redeeming their deposits in cash, thereby causing bank refinancing gaps.

Negative Rates Under Another Name

However, central banks are quite unlikely to abandon the idea of pushing real — that is inflation-adjusted — interest rates into the negative. What they might have in mind is allowing for “somewhat higher” nominal interest rates, accompanied by “somewhat higher” inflation, making sure that real interest rates remain in, or fall into, negative territory.

In this vein, the Federal Reserve of San Francisco suggested in a paper published on 15 August 2016 that monetary policy should rethink and possibly allow for an inflation of more than 2 percent.[1] The debate about higher inflation — say, 4 rather than 2 percent — is actually an old one; in academic circles it comes and goes in waves.

The central argument is that a somewhat higher inflation would “grease the wheel” of the economy, thereby supporting production and employment. Another argument has it that higher inflation would make it easier for the Fed to pull the economy out of recession, especially so if and when the “neutral interest rate” has come down considerably.

Creating “free money” to support bloated bureaucracies and corrupt cartels only makes the underlying problems worse.

The mere mention of helicopter money has intoxicated global stock markets, which have soared on the rumor of Japanese helicopter money. But as I explained in Why Helicopter Money Won’t Push Stocks Higher, central banks funding fiscal spending (i.e. helicopter money) will only have a weak and entirely indirect effect on profits or stock market valuations.

The problem with helicopter money is that it cannot fix what’s broken in the economy–and even worse, it perpetuates every inefficient, corrupt, bloated and unsustainable system in the status quo. As I explain in my book Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform, the problem isn’t lack of fiscal spending or stimulus; the problem is the primary systems of the status quo have failed and cannot be fixed with central bank easy money.

In effect, helicopter money feeds the perverse incentives that have crippled our economy and society. Rather than be forced to choose priorities and rid centralized systems of wasteful corruption, bloat and graft that siphon off wealth and destroy productivity, helicopter money enables the continuation of all the inefficient, corrupt, bloated and unsustainable systems that make up the status quo.

No sacrifices are required by helicopter money: unlimited sums of freshly created money will be used to fund the same broken systems that have generated extremes of debt and wealth/income inequality.

The Cleveland Fed’s Loretta Mester is a clueless apparatchik and Fed lifer, who joined the system in 1985 fresh out of Barnard and Princeton and has imbibed in its Keynesian groupthink and institutional arrogance ever since. So it’s not surprising that she was out flogging—-albeit downunder in Australia—- the next step in the Fed’s rolling coup d’ etat.

We’re always assessing tools that we could use,” Mester told the ABC’s AM program. “In the US we’ve done quantitative easing and I think that’s proven to be useful.

“So it’s my view that [helicopter money] would be sort of the next step if we ever found ourselves in a situation where we wanted to be more accommodative.

This is beyond the pale because “helicopter money” isn’t some kind of new wrinkle in monetary policy, at all. It’s an old as the hills rationalization for monetization of the public debt—–that is, purchase of government bonds with central bank credit conjured from thin air.

It’s the ultimate in “something for nothing” economics. That’s because most assuredly those government bonds originally funded the purchase of real labor hours, contract services or dams and aircraft carriers.

As a technical matter, helicopter money is exactly the same thing as QE. Nor does the journalistic confusion that it involves “direct” central bank funding of public debt make a wit of difference.

Suppose Washington issues treasury bonds to the 23 primary dealers on Wall Street in the regular manner. Further, assume that some or all of these dealers stick the bonds in inventory for 3 days, 3 months or even 3 years, and then sell them back to the Fed under QE (and most likely at a higher price).

COMMENT: Bill Gross says you are wrong and helicopter money is coming and the Fed should print trillions to buy government bonds. Any comments?

REPLY:Gross is not making a forecast without self-interest. Gross’ “helicopter money” calls for the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury to engage in another round of quantitative easing (QE) by printing trillions of dollars to buy government bonds. This is his Hail Mary play intended to boost the economy. How will that stimulate the economy? He runs Janus’ bond fund. It will only bail him out of losses on bonds.

Printing money to create “stimulation” is a fallacy. It has never worked. The theory of the quantity of money increasing or decreasing is pure nonsense. This typical one-dimensional thought process is incapable of understanding complexity.

The missing element is the velocity of money. If people hoard money without spending, then increasing the quantity of money will fail to produce inflation. Creating inflation, such as what Japan saw one month before raising the sales tax, demands that people see the price of goods rising so they spend the money faster because they fear it will cost them more tomorrow. Why did Roosevelt confiscate gold and devalue the dollar? People were hoarding money. There was such a shortage of money, more than 200 cities began to issue their own money known today as Depression Scrip.

This idea of “helicopter money” is rather pathetic and fails to dive deep into how the economy functions. Irrespective of the quantity of money, the velocity of money is what always distinguishes deflation from inflation. You could increase the money supply and nothing would happen. Alternatively, you could leave the money supply unchanged and people would suddenly lose confidence in government, causing the velocity to increase thereby producing inflation.

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong, I have listened to the gold propaganda and believed in it initially but with time they always say the same thing and nothing happens. One would think that this helicopter money should have produced inflation. This effort has failed as Japan and Europe keep moving negative punishing people for not spending. Now it seems that Americans are also starting to save more and spend less. Do we need reinflation and can government even tackle such a task?

Thoroughly confused

Thank you for your efforts

SJ

ANSWER: Governments have been pretending they can control the economy ever since Roosevelt adopted Marxism. The root of our problems lies directly in this idea that government can steer the economy as it desires. The rise of Trump and Sanders proves that something is wrong beneath the headlines.

There is a growing awareness today that the financial markets are beyond the control of national policymakers. We are even beginning to hear people in the business saying that publicly. While a few economies do have the scale to shape interconnected global markets with trade barriers, etc., they face serious constraints in doing so, not to mention political and economic consequences. As a result, the global economy is stuck in a declining financial cycle with few options for escape.

This idea of helicopter money is poorly constructed and assumes that the quantity of money is the explanation for inflation. There is no historical evidence of that proving to be true. The Roman Empire funded its budget on a general mix of 80% taxes and 20% through the creating new money. This did not result in 20% annual inflation.

Look closely at the chart above. The sharp collapse takes place because Maximinus I (235-238AD) declared war on the rich. He simply declared that all their wealth was his and paid informants to report on anyone they thought had unreported money.

Tensions are starting to rise between Germany and the ECB because Draghi will not admit his negative interest rates are causing an economic meltdown. “We continue to expect them (interest rates) to remain at present or lower levels for an extended period of time, and well past the horizon of our net asset purchases.” Draghi is absolutely clueless and this experiment has no end game. The rest of the central banks are starting to see that Draghi is risking it all for he cannot admit failure. Inflation is a function of interest rates insofar as the rate of interest is compatible with the expected rate of inflation. This is fundamental. Punishing savers and wiping out pensions is not the way to create a future. This will not end very nicely.

All Draghi is doing is making the smart banks richer. They don’t have to pay anything, but they charge people money for having an account. Yet, if you want to take out a mortgage for 10 years, fully collateralized, they demand 5%. The smart bankers are making the widest spreads in history on a percentage basis between bid and ask. Is Draghi insane? Or is he simply looking at this from the perspective of his former employer — Goldman Sachs?

So-called helicopter money involves using a central bank’s power to create money to directly inject funds either into government coffers or straight into the pockets of the public. Yet, nothing has been working and the ECB is now stating that they will continue to buy in debt, but they will also buy corporate debt. On the other side of the table lies the banks. The banks are advising the ECB what to buy so they can clean out the crap from their books. This is by no means in any textbook on how to manage the economy for dummies. The ECB is just shooting in the dark, hoping this will one day have some effect.

While in theory this should be creating money that would be inflationary, no such impact would take place if all they are doing is buying in debt from banks who are desperate to get their balance sheets in order. This money is just monetizing money already lost. Hence, they are not really creating helicopter money until the real money supply increases and passes through the banks into the hands of the public, which has NOT been taking place.

Central banks rely WAY TOO MUCH on commercial/investment banks who both front-run them in the markets of today. The ECB says they will buy corporates and the spread comes in 30bp instantly because the banks have a buyer who has announced they will be a buyer. Those in government are really clueless. When Gordon Brown announced in advance that he would see the British gold reserves, the price fell, the market bought the gold and then it rallied. Those in government have absolutely no idea how markets function.

On Friday, courtesy of a Deutsche Bank report laughably titled Helicopter Money 101, we showed how to trade the coming helicopter money paradrop that will be provided by central banks in the very near future. When asking the question of who would be the first to try it, one of the first central banks that comes to mind (both Deutsche’s and ours) would be the Bank of Japan. To date, the BoJ has tried everything in order to increase inflation (or simply to generate any, for that matter), and boost their economy. Everything that is, except for helicopter money (giving money directly to the government or citizens and bypassing all current institutions acting as middle men).

Yesterday according to Bloomberg, BoJ governor Haruhiko Kuroda said that he isn’t thinking about using so-called helicopter money, and that the notion contradicts the law.

“In advanced nations nowadays, fiscal policy is determined by the government and the parliament while monetary policy is decided by the central bank, which is separate from government and parliament,” Kuroda told lawmakers in the Japanese Diet. “Deciding and implementing these things together would contradict the current legal framework. So unless the existing legal framework changes, helicopter money isn’t possible, and we at the Bank of Japan aren’t thinking about it at all.“

If you read the end of that carefully, you’ll want to revisit our article on how to trade the coming helicopter money (here). First, we’ll start with the fact that Deutsche Bank already has an answer on how to work around the “current legal framework”, and it’s called simply getting the legislature’s approval.

If you don’t think the current central bank driven economic and financial bubble is going to end badly, recall a crucial historical fact. To wit, the worldwide race of central banks to the zero bound and NIRP and their $10 trillion bond-buying spree during the last seven years was the brain child of Ben S Bernanke.

He’s the one who falsely insisted that Great Depression 2.0 was just around the corner in September 2008. Along with Goldman’s plenipotentiary at the US Treasury, Hank Paulson, it was Bernanke who stampeded the entirety of Washington into tossing out the window the whole rule book of sound money, fiscal rectitude and free market discipline.

In fact, there was no extraordinary crisis. The Lehman failure essentially triggered a self-contained leverage and liquidity bust in the canyons of Wall Street, and it would have burned out there had the Fed allowed money market interest rates to do their work. That is, to rise sufficiently to force into liquidation the gambling houses like Lehman, Goldman and Morgan Stanley that had loaded their balance sheets with trillions of illiquid or long-duration assets and funded them with cheap overnight money.

There would have been no significant spillover effect. The notions that the financial system was imploding into a black hole and that ATMs would have gone dark and money market funds failed are complete urban legends. They were concocted by Wall Street to panic Washington into massive intervention to save their stocks and partnership shares.

The same is true of the claim that corporate payrolls would have been missed for want of revolving credit availability and that the entirety of AIG had to be bailed out to the tune of $185 billion in order to protect insurance and annuity holders.

When monetary policy alone is inadequate to support economic recovery or to avoid too-low inflation, fiscal policy provides a potentially powerful alternative—especially when interest rates are “stuck” near zero. However, in recent years, legislatures in advanced industrial economies have for the most part been reluctant to use fiscal tools, in many cases because of concerns that government debt is already too high. In this context, Milton Friedman’s idea of money-financed (as opposed to debt-financed) tax cuts—“helicopter money”—has received a flurry of attention, with influential advocates including Adair Turner, Willem Buiter, and Jordi Gali.

In this post, I consider the merits of helicopter money as a (presumably last-resort) strategy for policymakers. I make two points. First, in theory at least, helicopter money could prove a valuable tool. In particular, it has the attractive feature that it should work even when more conventional monetary policies are ineffective and the initial level of government debt is high. However, second, as a practical matter, the use of helicopter money would involve some difficult issues of implementation. These include (1) the need to integrate the approach with standard monetary policy frameworks and (2) the challenge of achieving the necessary coordination between fiscal and monetary policymakers, without compromising central bank independence or long-run fiscal discipline. I propose some tentative solutions for these problems.

To be clear, the probability of so-called helicopter money being used in the United States in the foreseeable future seems extremely low.

Now that the prospect of helicopter money by the ECB has so infuriated Germany, the ECB had to reach out to Schauble to “mollify” the Germans who are dreading the second coming of monetary paradrops in one century, it was only a matter of time before Citadel’s most prominent employer opined. In a blog post earlier today, Brookings’ blogger and the central banker who together with Alan Greenspan has been most responsible for the world’s unprecedented debt pile and sad economic state, Ben Bernanke, took the podium to share his views on “helicopter money” head on.

“Let us suppose now that one day a helicopter flies over this community and drops an additional $1,000 in bills from the sky, which is, of course, hastily collected by members of the community. Let us suppose further that everyone is convinced that this is a unique event which will never be repeated.” (Milton Friedman, “The Optimum Quantity of Money,” 1969)

He then pulls a quote from his own book “The Courage to Act”

“The deflation speech saddled me with the nickname ‘Helicopter Ben.’ In a discussion of hypothetical possibilities for combating deflation I mentioned an extreme tactic—a broad-based tax cut combined with money creation by the central bank to finance the cut. Milton Friedman had dubbed the approach a ‘helicopter drop’ of money. Dave Skidmore, the media relations officer…had advised me to delete the helicopter-drop metaphor…

It has finally sunk in: what everyone really wants is helicopter money. Central banks, instead of transferring trillions of newly created dollars or euros or whatever to the banks should just hand them directly to the people, like dropping bank notes from a helicopter, so that these people can grab them and spend them all in one fell swoop, thereby creating sudden artificial demand, driving up inflation, and solving all economic problems of our times.

Instead of creating asset price inflation, as QE had done, it would create consumer price inflation. Wages would still remain stuck, and workers would soon not be able to buy the normal things at these inflated prices, but that wouldn’t matter because now they’re getting helicopter money, and companies could increase their sales, margins, and profits simply by raising prices without having to sell a single extra item.

Among economists, it’s the hottest idea of the century. But the ECB will have none of it. Or so it said today, on two different occasions, by two different officials, curiously using the same words.

“It’s not on the table,” ECB Executive Board member Peter Praet told a bunch of economists today who’d been pushing for an answer at a conference organized by the Center for Financial Studies in Frankfurt.

He hadn’t come to discuss helicopter money. His speech was all about rationalizing monetary policy measures that have become absurd to everyone except to those who’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid.

He was explaining how these measures — the negative interest rates, the more-than-free money where lenders pay borrowers, the purchases of bonds, including securities backed by Italian non-performing corporate debt, the whole schmear — would “ward off the risk of a too prolonged period of low inflation,” although low inflation benefits every worker in the Eurozone.

Moments ago, ECB governing council member and Bank of Italy governor Ignazio Visco had some very troubling comments.

He said that while helicopter money is not currently part of the discussion in the Governing Council that “no policy tool within our mandate can or should be dismissed a priori.” The reason for this startling admission is “the importance of expectations of low inflation in determining wage outcomes, and thus giving rise to second- round effects, may be increasing.”

He cited Italy’s recently signed collective contracts where “it was agreed that parts of future pay rises will be revised downwards in the event that the inflation rate falls short of current forecasts” adding that a “a generalized adoption of this type of contract would significantly decrease the rate of growth of wages and this would in turn be reflected in the dynamics of consumer prices.”

He went on to defend existing monetary policy which has so far only resulted in savings hoarding, ongoing deflation and a slammed banking sector, saying that “Regarding Italy, the effects are estimated to be somewhat stronger: absent the monetary impulse, the Italian recession would have ended only in 2017; inflation would have remained negative for the whole three-year period.”

But back to helicopter money: Visco also said that: “such an extreme measure would undoubtedly be subject to operational and legal constraints.”

Is the ECB really this cloase to helicopter money? It appears so, because as he notes “the redistributive implications and the close ties with fiscal policy would all make it very complex, all the more so in the euro area given its institutional framework.” He concluded that a discussion on the measure “is noteworthy, not much per se, but because it underlines the concern that monetary policy is left to act in isolation.”